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Nicole gave him a wry look and headed for the door.
‘I’ve got people interested in you, you stupid little black bitch,’ he shouted.
That did it. He’d been fine until he’d called her that. How dare he? She was proud of her Indian heritage and her colour, not that she knew much about India really, but she was proud of it anyway. Rage coursing in every vein, Nicole whirled round. She wanted to hit him but pride stopped her. He could behave like scum from the gutter but she wouldn’t.
‘When I’m famous, Dickie, I hope you’ll remember that you could have been a part of it.’ She gazed at him superciliously. ‘Except you got too greedy. And I will be famous, I promise you.’ With that, she left, her long silky hair flying as she strode out of the building.
She would be famous. She knew it in her bones. Dickie had done one good thing for her: he’d shown her that she wanted to make it as a singer. She’d been hiding from it for years but he’d helped her see that she could do it – and that she wanted to. She owed him that. Maybe she’d send him a ticket for her first gig.
Sharon was furious. ‘The scumbag,’ she raged. ‘I knew he was trouble. I’ll go round and kill him meself. No, I’ll get my brother to do it.’
‘Don’t waste your time,’ Nicole said. ‘No, what I need you to do is help me with some research. I need to make a demo tape and I want to know where I can do it cheaply. Secondly, I’ve got to find out who to send it to. Put your thinking cap on, Shazz. Between the pair of us, we must know somebody who can help.’
Sharon’s second cousin’s flatmate knew a studio engineer who wouldn’t mind a bit of moonlighting as a one-off. He knew who to send demos to but warned Sharon that record companies got zillions of tapes every year. ‘They probably file them in the black plastic filing cabinet,’ he said.
Nicole shrugged. ‘I’ll take that chance.’
The cheapest studio time for recording sessions was in the middle of the night, so at two a.m. two weeks later, Nicole, Sharon and Sharon’s second cousin, Elaine, lined up in Si-borg Studios. The engineer had drummed up four musicians to play along with her and, to hide her nerves, Nicole whispered to Sharon that the musicians mustn’t be much good if they were prepared to play in the middle of the night for damn all money. The money was from Nicole’s building society account and she still felt anxious every time she thought of spending it on something so ephemeral.
‘Shut up,’ hissed Tommy, the engineer, ‘or they’ll all go home. They’re not that desperate.’
Embarrassed, Nicole lit up. Nobody looked askance at her. At Si-borg, it was the people who didn’t smoke who looked out of place. The musicians, engineer and even the receptionist all puffed madly so the entire premises was fuggy with smoke and the walls were stained a cloudy vanilla thanks to years of late-night Marlboro sessions.
The first hour was hell for Nicole. Used to launching into a song as soon as the karaoke machine played it or singing her own compositions alone in her bedroom, she found it impossible to stop and start as the real musicians warmed up by snapping strings, getting riffs wrong and grumbling about unfamiliar songs.
‘What’s wrong with them?’ she whispered to Tommy as they took a break, mindful of keeping her voice down in case the musicians walked out.
‘Whitney Houston and Sade are not their thing,’ he grinned. ‘If you wanted to launch into something by the Manic Street Preachers, these would be your men.’
‘Charming.’ Nicole stomped off to the loo. She leaned her head against the mirror and closed her eyes wearily. This wasn’t working out as planned. She’d taken Tommy’s advice and had gone for covering other people’s songs instead of her own ones because he said her voice was the main thing and the demo would have greater impact that way.
She’d been so excited at the thought of working with real musicians and had had visions of herself belting out flawless hit after hit with everyone in the studio watching her in admiration.
Instead, all she had was a sore throat from the combination of singing and smoking too much, and she really wished she hadn’t worn those ultra tight pink snakeskin jeans and high-heeled boots. She felt bloated because she was pre-menstrual and the waistband of the jeans was cutting into her flesh like cheese wire. Why was she doing this? She must have been mad. Just because she could hold a note didn’t make her Mariah Carey. Would it be awful if she told them all to go home because she couldn’t keep going?
‘Nicole!’ said Sharon, dancing into the grimy loo clutching a can of beer and a roll-up that Nicole would swear was filled with more than just tobacco. ‘Isn’t it exciting? God, they love you. I just overheard the bass player telling Tommy that you had a fantastic voice and wondering if you needed a band?’
Nicole stood up straight and blinked tiredly. The harsh fluorescent light hurt her eyes: they were red-rimmed with tiredness, no matter how much kohl she’d painted around them.
‘They said what?’
‘That you’re marvellous! That you’ve got “star quality”,’ Sharon said happily. ‘Well, I could have told them that but it’s good that they think so, don’t you think?’ She prattled away about the bass player and how he’d said that Nicole was ‘mega’.
Nicole half listened and stared at her reflection in the mirror. Underneath the tired face and the weary eyes, there was a certain radiance. She smiled and the radiance shone out at her, bypassing the tiredness instantly. Star quality, huh?
‘Have you got any of that bright red lipstick on you, Sharon?’ she asked. ‘I left my bag downstairs and I look like death warmed up.’
Sharon rummaged around in a handbag the size of Santa’s toy sack and found the lipstick in question.
With a slightly shaking hand, Nicole applied a thick buttery layer. On her dark little face with her eyes glowing like jet, the rich crimson looked incredible. Sexy and mysterious at the same time. Nicole pouted theatrically at herself. ‘Let’s go get ‘em,’ she said with a huge grin.
CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_822235d6-1afc-505f-be2e-2d0f80b7f23e)
Millie’s roars could be heard in three counties at least.
‘Don’t want to be in the car!’ she bellowed, her small face screwed up with anger and rage.
‘Neither do I,’ muttered Hope tight-lipped as she negotiated the hire car along the winding road, oblivious to the wind and rain swept scenery they were passing by. When the plane had banked before it arrived in Kerry’s airport, Hope had done her best to peer out the window and see what sort of fabled, emerald isle she was landing on, but Toby had chosen that moment to grizzle miserably at the jerking motion of the aircraft, so she’d dragged her eyes away from the slightly bleak looking patchwork fields and comforted him. Now the rain was lashing down, giving the whole place a dismal air that was at odds with Matt’s description of it.
‘I remember sitting with Gearóid on the steps in the sun, him with a bottle of Guinness, the sound of the bees droning around us and the smell of hay being cut in the fields nearby. Everything was rich greens and soft golds…’
They must both have been drinking Guinness, Hope reflected, because there was nothing sunny or golden about the modern version of Kerry, even allowing for the fact that it was a blisteringly cold November day. Any bees buzzing around would have been drowned in the downpour.
This was not what she’d hoped for. Definitely not.
‘It’s going to be fabulous,’ Dan had said enthusiastically at the Parkers’ leaving do in the Three Carpenters two days before Matt’s departure. ‘The way Matt has described Ireland to me makes it sound magical.’
‘We all envy you so much,’ said a swaying Betsey, who’d come from a publicity launch in London for a new perfume and was half-plastered on free champagne, not to mention reeking of free scent. ‘You’ll have a blast.’
Hope, still exhausted from the stress of packing up the house and the misery of having to hand in her notice in the building society, sincerely hoped she would, although she felt that a week in a health farm was probably what she needed to relax her.
‘You will keep in touch, won’t you?’ begged Yvonne, who was unexpectedly tearful at the thought of Hope leaving. ‘I’ll miss you, you know.’
Hope hugged her. ‘ ‘Course I will. I’ll be back in no time at all. And you can come and visit us. Matt tells me it’s a beautiful place.’
He’d talked longingly of sitting on the coast on the Beara Peninsula looking over the rugged Atlantic, listening to the sound of the curlews as you created perfect prose. And he’d told her how Redlion nestled in a valley that protected it from the cruel winds that blew in off the sea. ‘Idyllic’ had been his word for it.
It didn’t seem very idyllic at the moment, though. Hope began to think that the original idea of Matt driving her Metro via the ferry to Ireland ten days earlier to get the cottage shipshape hadn’t been such a good idea. Travelling with the children was always a nightmare and she could have done with some help. It would also have been nice to have some reassurance that it didn’t rain all the time and that this downpour was unusual she hoped.
But Matt had insisted that someone had to do some work on the cottage because the lawyer had mentioned it was a bit ‘uncared for.’ And he’d also been keen to meet the artistic community people he’d been corresponding with, in relation to working in their centre, as soon as possible.
Hope tried to concentrate on the road, which wasn’t easy with Millie yelling. Their progress since landing had been slow to say the least. Just when Hope was panicking about being stranded without their luggage, her five suitcases had finally turned up. Battling through the small but incredibly crowded airport with two fractious children, she’d picked up the sturdy four-wheel drive vehicle she’d booked in advance and had just managed to hump all their cases into it without giving herself a hernia when Millie decided to throw a tantrum.
A visit to the ladies, bribery involving biscuits and juice, and the purchase of a cuddly bear in an Aran sweater had all been useless. Millie had decided she was not in a good mood, wailing so hysterically that a cluster of little old ladies disembarking from a coach at the airport doors had looked at Hope as if she was wearing a sign saying ‘unfit mother.’
True to form, Millie had yelled and cried at full blast for the last hour as her harassed mother read the map, worked out where she was going and made it out past the lunchtime rush in Killarney. Trying not to mow down pedestrians had been the biggest problem. People in Killarney just seemed to walk out in front of the car, not caring that she was a few feet away from them in a deadly piece of all-terrain vehicle with bull bars on the front. Did they look right and left before crossing the road? No, they just threw themselves blithely into the traffic, hopping over puddles and treating the passing cars like nuisances. The Irish were all mad, she decided darkly. She wished Matt had been able to collect them but as the Metro had burst a gasket and was currently languishing in the local garage, it made more sense to rent a car because they’d need transport until the Metro was fixed.
Toby sat quietly in the back, strapped in carefully. Millie, feeling liberated because the car seats were coming later, kept trying to remove her seat belt until Hope had to stop the car and attach her even more firmly. Outraged at being unable to move so freely, Millie decided to roar even more.
Finally, Hope could stand it no longer. The rain had practically stopped and they all needed a bit of fresh air. A
few miles outside Killarney, she stopped the car by a gate at the side of the road, got out and unhooked the children.
It was windy and there was still a fine mist of rain that dampened the children’s hair immediately, but Millie didn’t care. Delighted to be free, she bounced over to the big rusty gate, surprising the herd of muddy black and white cows huddled next to the ditch.
‘Cows,’ she said as happily as if she’d just discovered a herd of rare beasts.
Toby clung to his mother nervously. He wasn’t keen on big animals and when he’d been taken to the zoo, he’d sobbed at the sight of the elephants. Millie, on the other hand, had had to be restrained from clambering up the monkey enclosure, waving her ice cream enticingly.
‘It’s all right, darling,’ Hope said now, hoisting Toby onto her hip and carrying him to the gate. ‘They’re friendly.’
As if to disprove this point, one of the cows lurched towards the gate in investigative mode.
Millie squealed with delight and Toby hid his face in Hope’s shoulder, shuddering with fear.
‘Mummy, will we have cows?’ demanded Millie excitedly.
Hope had absolutely no idea. If cows were included in the property, Matt hadn’t mentioned them. His memory of Uncle Gearóid’s had included a quaint cottage covered with old fashioned roses and an expanse of wild looking garden out the front. He’d been a bit woolly on the other details although the lawyer’s letter had mentioned four bedrooms, a kitchen with a genuine iron range and a bathroom with an antique claw foot bath. It all sounded lovely, but then, so did novels about the Middle Ages where nobody mentioned the pain of not having dentists and how women routinely died in agonizing childbirth. Hope thought about her lovely, only-just-paid-for modern freezer and the shower in their house in Bath where you’d swear you were being stabbed with millions of exquisite tiny needles when you turned it on at full blast. She didn’t hold out much hope for a quaint cottage having such a marvellous plumbing innovation. But then, who knew? Uncle Gearóid could have been a modern sort of man with a passion for Bang and Olufsen stereos, giant kitchen equipment with icemakers, and a jacuzzi. The unknown was exciting, Matt had said before he left.
However, on the phone since then, he’d sounded a bit dreamy and short on facts about things like plumbing and installing two phone lines for the e-mail so he could correspond with the office. Men liked the unknown, women didn’t, Hope decided.
‘It’s so unspoiled,’ he’d said the night before over a crackly phone line. ‘You’re going to love it.’
Mind you, he’d thought she was going to love the black lace thong underwear he’d purchased for her birthday on a trip to Bristol. Sam had insisted that if you wore thongs for two weeks, you never went back to normal knickers again. Hope had given up after two days.
Still, they had the house in Bath. If the rural writing retreat proved too rural, she could always up sticks and bring the children home. So, they had rented it out for a year but Hope was sure she’d find a way round that. That’s what lawyers were for.
‘Come on,’ she said now in bright Mummy-speak. ‘Back to the car, we’ve got a bit longer to go and then you can explore our new home!’
The children clambered back into the car and Hope strapped them in, thankful they’d fallen for her faux enthusiasm. Back on the road, she admired the scenery and tried to pretend that it didn’t look very bleak. Beautiful, certainly, with those majestic purple mountains looming in the horizon and a faint mist covering them like icing sugar rained down by some heavenly cook. Everywhere was astonishingly green in the rain but a tad desolate. Not really like the idyllic, sun-drenched place she’d seen in the Discover Ireland travel book.
So far, Hope couldn’t imagine the sun ever shining in this remote part of the world. She liked visiting romantically desolate spots for cosy weekends, enjoying going for a walk in the woods as long as there was a glorious hotel complete with log fire in the bar when they got back so they could roast their wet socks, giggle over a couple of hot ports and plan what to wear for dinner.
Real life desolation all the time was a different proposition. The scenery around her looked so…well, untamed. The countryside around Bath was green too, but it seemed more laid out and more normal. Here, the fields were all sizes with stone walls and briar hedges going off in all directions. The drivers were all mad too: she’d nearly been forced off the road by some little old man in a van who could barely see over the dashboard and at least six flashy new cars had overtaken her in exasperation on dangerous bits of road, obviously furious to be behind a hire car going at a respectable forty miles an hour.
At a tiny crossroads with no signpost at all, she consulted her map again. If it was to be believed, she had to take the right turn, follow the road for a few miles and then she’d come to a town. She drove carefully until she came to the first signs of habitation.
‘Quaint, untouched,’ had been Matt’s verdict on Redlion, the small town where their house was situated.
‘Really quaint,’ Hope thought grimly as she drove into it a few minutes later.
She had to turn off before she got to the main street, therefore not seeing all of the place, but on first viewing with the rain pelting down in a sheet, Matt’s quaint town was anything but. What she could see consisted of a winding line of terraced houses, one battered pub, a tiny post office, a convenience shop with security bars that looked capable of stopping a tank, and a caravan park with its signpost hanging drunkenly from one corner. Thinking she must be in the wrong place, because this could hardly be the pretty place Matt had described, she came to a hump backed bridge. An elderly green water pump over the bridge signalled that she was, indeed, in Redlion. Matt had mentioned both the bridge and the pump and according to him, she had to take the next left which was a winding road that led away from the town to her new home. It was official, she decided: she was now in The Back Of Beyond.
With an increasing sense of doom, Hope drove down a narrow lane with a grass spine in the middle and big puddles of mud either side. She felt the same way she’d felt when she and Sam had gone to big school for the first time: a little bit excited at the thought of being a big girl, a bit more excited about her school uniform with the dark blue jumper, and absolutely terrified at the thought of all those other girls with their normal families who’d think that she and Sam were weird having no parents and only a mad old aunt to pick them up from school.
She rounded a corner, past a giant monkey puzzle tree that bent out over the lane, and then she saw it. Her new home.
If the outskirts of Redlion had been given a grievous battering with the ugly stick, Curlew Cottage had escaped. Gloriously pretty, it sat snugly in a wilderness of hedges and beech trees and looked as if it been drawn by an illustrator who was trying to imagine a home for the Seven Dwarves. From the small windows with their latticed shutters to the fat wooden door with black iron fittings, it was adorable. The pretty climbing rose that Matt had waxed lyrical about had been cut back and, as it was November, there would have been no flowers clustering round the door anyway, but that was the only negative thing she could see. It was a bit run down but what would you expect from an elderly man living here on his own for years?
Hope sighed with relief. At that exact moment, an unseen cockerel loudly proclaimed that this was his territory and that they better back off. Toby shrieked with fear and Millie shrieked with delight.
‘Let me out Mummy,’ she roared, desperate to explore.
The cockerel crowed again.
An attack hen, Hope decided, feeling her sense of humour return.
The rain had stopped, so she let the kids out, warning them to stay close. Toby didn’t need any telling and clung to her trouser legs. Millie, on the other hand, raced off after the cockerel.
‘Come back!’ yelled Hope nervously with her city-mother mentality. ‘Right now!’
Millie wavered long enough for her mother to grab her anorak hood. With Millie reined in and wriggling crossly and Toby sucking his thumb nervously, they made their way to the front door.
‘Where’s Daddy?’ Millie said with interest.
Good question, Hope thought. She’d hoped he’d be waiting for them, ready to run out, throw his arms around his family and say he’d missed them desperately for the past ten days. She’d been watching too much TV, she reckoned. Husbands only ran out in thrilled delight on made-for-TV movies or romantic dramas. They never did it in real life except when they were famished and you’d just been at the shops buying food.
She knocked at the front door. No reply. After a moment, she turned the handle and the door creaked open a fraction. Should they go in or not? She dithered until an ominous rumble in the sky signalled an end to the brief interlude of dry weather.
Rain started pelting down again like a tropical storm. ‘Gosh, isn’t this exciting,’ Hope said gaily to the children as she pushed the door fully open.
Inside, the adorable cottage scenario went awry. The first thing to hit Hope was the cold. Still warm from the steamed-up atmosphere of the car, the cool November air had barely registered with her at first. Now, standing inside the cottage she was struck by an arctic sensation. Stone floors, stone walls and no visible source of heat made for a combination of bone-chilling damp and cold. In fact, everything in the cottage looked damp and cold. Instead of the hand-crafted wooden furniture, lovingly made frilled curtains and air of sparkling cleanliness she’d prayed for, she was faced with a big bare room with no curtains at all. The only furniture was a coffee table and two elderly tweedy armchairs with disturbing dark, oily patches on the cushions.
Hope held the children’s hands more tightly as she gazed around her in horror. This wasn’t fit to live in: it hadn’t been painted for years and was completely filthy. The cobwebs that festooned the ceiling were the least of her worries. Matt had made the entire family emigrate and their new home wasn’t a cosy cottage but a dishevelled shed. She wanted to cry. Her thoughts were broken by the sound of a car engine and a slamming door.
‘Millie, Toby! Sorry I’m late, love. Just got caught up with the gang!’ Matt rushed into the room, hair plastered down on his forehead, wearing an unfamiliar sludge brown jacket, mud splattered corduroys, Wellington boots and a welcoming expression.
He gave Hope a brief warm kiss and then picked a child up in each arm, hugging them to him.
‘Did you miss Daddy?’ he demanded.
‘Yes,’ said Millie huskily, burying her little head lovingly in his shoulder. ‘Lots and lots and this big.’ She demonstrated how much she’d missed him by holding her arms wide.
Hope didn’t want to break up this cosy family thing. She felt like the bitch from Hell about to remind Snow White that it might not be a good idea to shack up with seven small men who were looking for a cheap housekeeper, but it had to be done. Besides which, Matt hadn’t thrown his arms around her.
‘Matt,’ she said in her everything-in-the-garden-is-rosy voice so as not to alarm the children, ‘we need to talk about the cottage.’
‘Isn’t it lovely,’ he said. ‘So naïf.’
‘What?’ she said, rosy garden voice disappearing to be replaced by sour-milk voice.
‘You know, unspoiled,’ he said artlessly.
‘How about unclean, unpainted and utterly unsuitable for two small children,’ she snapped back at him, tiredness and a general feeling of being unloved making her cross. ‘Not to mention freezing. We’ll all get hypothermia if we live here. This is a dump. I don’t suppose you were roughing it here?’
‘Well, no, I was at Finula’s and I know we have a lot to do here and I’m sorry I haven’t really got started but I thought we could manage for a few days with those portable stoves and then get some work done on Monday…’
‘Matt, you mean you haven’t told Hope the place wasn’t ready yet?’ said a low, throaty female voice. ‘How bold of you. Slap, slap.’
They both turned to face the newcomer. Tall, rotund and exuding rural friendliness, she was forty-something and wore a selection of flapping garments that all appeared to be patterned by the hand of Laura Ashley. Hope identified pyjama-style trousers, a voluminous shirt and a rakishly-angled hat, all flowery and pink. A big tartan shawl completed the outfit.
‘Hope, meet Finula Headley-Ryan, the leading light of the artistic community in Redlion and the lady who’s been so kind about getting me into the writers’ centre at short notice.’
‘Tsk, tsk,’ said Finula, clearly delighted with this description but pretending she wasn’t. ‘I’m only an old dauber, hardly an artist at all.’
She sailed over to Hope and held out a freckled hand, weighed down with elaborate old gold rings. The glamorous effect was slightly ruined by chipped scarlet nail varnish that revealed yellowing nails underneath.
‘I’m sure you’re not so pleased to meet anyone when this house is like the wreck of the Hesperus,’ she said in that low, thrilling voice. ‘Matt, you are a melt for not telling the poor girl that the place isn’t habitable. Think of the shock she got when she thought this was her new home in all its freezing glory. What are you like?’
